The Aggies are coming off two excellent conference wins on the road last week with wins over Long Beach 85-82 and CSUN 66-62. They will be looking to win 3 games in a row for the first time this season when Fullerton comes to town tonight at 7 pm. The Titans are fresh off a home victory over Long Beach by the same score as the Aggies' 66-62. Fullerton's signature win of the season was their 77-74 upset of UCLA back on December 28th.
The Titans have two former Aggies on their coaching staff: Dedrique Taylor is in his 7th season at the helm of the Titans and he has been joined by first year Assistant Coach Gus Argenal.
Tipoff is at 7 pm in the Pavilion. Live stream is from Big West TV and the radio PxP by Scott Marsh is on KHTK 1140 AM.
This one needs to go in the win column tonight. It'll be weird seeing CSUF without Ahmad and Allman (they always seemed to kill the Ags). Rowe is still there and he'll be a tough matchup. But if we continue to play the tough team defense that we did last week, and add in some friendly home rims on offense, hopefully we see a good outcome. We are 4.5 point favorites.
This is a big one, with a road game at Hawaii and home v Irvine coming up. be nice to be at the 3-1 level after tonight. Irvine is at LBSU and CSUN is at UCSB. I'll be in attendence. Hope we have a decent turnout.
31-24 Titans. Fullerton looks like the dominant team and I'd say we're lucky to be down only 7, but on the other hand, just a few more of those threes go in and the narrative changes completely.
Yes, 3/15 but I thought the Titans were hotter, yet they were only 4/13 according to ESPN. That doesn't seem right, but it adds up. I hope the Ags shoot better in the 2nd half and commit fewer dumb turnovers.
Ags now down only one, but they'll have to play a lot better than this in Hawaii or they'll be run out of the arena. Notice that they've only shot 2 free throws the whole game.
Gotta like the way the Aggies scrapped til the end, but too little, too late. Fullerton is the team that beat UCLA earlier this year, so they have a lot of talent when they want to play.
If there's one thing that I look at with this team is how early in a half do they get into the bonus. One, because we are a good FT shooting team so it leads to "easy" points, but also that it shows just how aggressive we are. Last night I felt that we settled too much for the 3 pointer rather than driving and creating contact. Sure there were sections, most notably a part mid way through the second half where it looked like Manjon couldn't be stopped, but overall it just seemed like we were a step slow. Credit CSUF as I thought there overall defense was as tough as I've seen against us. As you said, we'll need to play much much better Saturday against the Bows if we are to have any chance.
that was a disappointing showing for the Aggies. From the get-go, we were much less aggressive than Fullerton. Gonzalez was hot initially off the bench with 2 3's, but that was it for him. Mooney never got untracked (very good defense). The inside guys were out muscled. They were in the bonus early in the 2nd half, because they were going hard to the hoop. we'd get the lead to 2 or 3, then they would push it back up. we had a couple frustrating possessions where we got a stop (down 3), but they got the rebound and put it in. the spurt at the end was exciting, but we could have used that aggression and intensity about 39 minutes earlier. Les was fuming on the post game about not playing hard at home. hard to blame him. the next two are tough games, so we could be 2-4 really quickly.
I agree with everything you both said. Riverside and Fullerton both dictated the game with their aggressiveness and especially their defensive quickness against us. Both of those teams disrupted our offensive flow with tough defense.
We also had no answer for Fullerton's muscle and quickness inside. Neither Neufeld or Koehler have the athletic quickness to match up well against teams with strong, quick power forwards and posts. I'd like to see a floor chart of the shots that Fullerton made last night. They hit layup after layup and they did so repeatedly with aggressive determination.
Strong length with quickness inside is the Achilles heel of the Aggies and it forces us to beat teams primarily with the long ball offensively. We also often end up with a bunch of fouls early trying to stop teams from pounding the ball inside and that hurts us against teams who can hit their FT's like Fullerton did last night.